Dear Colleagues and Students,
I am pleased to announce that Igor Marjanović, an architect, educator and curator, has been named the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture, effective July 1.
Igor comes to Rice from Washington University in St. Louis, where he is the JoAnne Stolaroff Cotsen Professor and chair of undergraduate architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Trained as an architect at the University of Belgrade in his native Serbia (then Yugoslavia), Igor completed his undergraduate thesis at the Moscow Architectural Institute. He received a master’s in architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Igor has practiced architecture with Osnova Projekt in Belgrade, Denise Pontes Arquitetura Interiores in Fortaleza, Brazil, and OWP/P Architects (now CannonDesign) in Chicago, where he focused on its educational portfolio of new buildings for Chicago Public Schools.
As program chair at Washington University, Igor created a distinct academic vision that integrated architectural and liberal arts education, recruiting diverse students and faculty and demonstrating a commitment to equity and inclusion as the foundation of social transformation and academic distinction.
He received the 2009 American Institute of Architects Education Award for his Florence studio, which focuses on the Mediterranean refugee crisis, situating architectural explorations within the contemporary context of globalization, immigration and decolonization.
And, his collaborative approach to research has led to several critically acclaimed books including his most recent book “The Evolving Project: The Journal of Architectural Education and the Expansion of Scholarship,” a co-edited volume that tells the story of postwar architectural pedagogy as an intellectual platform that engaged the larger social, cultural and political issues of its time.
Igor is a great addition to Rice and to the university’s School of Architecture. He is an accomplished designer and scholar who brings great vision, endless energy and a collaborative spirit to the position. I look forward to working with him and know you will too.
If you want to know more about Igor, please read the Rice News story highlighting his appointment. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Igor on his new role at Rice, and thanking interim Dean John Casbarian, the Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Professor of Architecture, who took charge of the school in June 2019 following the appointment of Dean Sarah Whiting to lead the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. John will remain on the faculty in the School of Architecture once his job as interim dean is complete at the end of June.
Kind regards,
Reginald DesRoches, Provost